Win Win

3halfstarsGo to showtimes

AMY BIANCOLLI, FILM WRITER |
April 7, 2011

Writer-director Thomas McCarthy makes movies about accidental families, misfits thrown together (at a house, a pied-à-terre, a train station) who form unanticipated and unconventional bonds of friendship.

McCarthy acts, too — he tends to play skittish supporting characters, often named Bob — though not in his own films so far. Before the camera and behind it, he's an unobtrusive presence: Win Win marks his third film with cinematographer Oliver Bokelberg (after The Station Agent and The Visitor), and all of them have a visual forthrightness that highlights meaning and emotion without a trace of gratuitous flash. The effect is an endearing and plainspoken clarity that stops just short of naturalism; the people in his movies don't seem real, exactly, but we end up caring about them as though they were.

Take Kyle (Alex Shaffer), the 16-year-old at the heart of Win Win. He's a tough customer, a bleached Ohio punk with a gift for wrestling who shows up on his estranged grandfather's doorstep in New Providence, N.J. (McCarthy's hometown). Grandpa Leo (Burt Young) isn't there, having been plopped in a nursing home by Mike (Paul Giamatti), a struggling lawyer who obtained Leo's guardianship for the $1,500 per month he gets in compensation.

But Mike isn't an entirely bad guy — no one is, in McCarthyland. He's a flawed guy, which means he knows full well what's required of him. And when he learns that Kyle's mother (Melanie Lynskey) is negligent and drug addicted, and now in rehab, he knows he ought to take the boy in. Simplifying this decision is the fact that Mike coaches a pathetically bad wrestling squad, and Kyle's arrival lends a welcome boost to the team's prospects.

Win Win isn't a straight-up sports movie, though it does offer a few vivid scenes of triumph and loss on the mat. It doesn't obey the conventional rhythms of the genre.

Nor does it obey every convention of the indie comedy or its acid-tongued relative, the seriocomic portrait of a suburban dad in crisis. It's too sweet for that, too modest in its narrative quirk, balancing the funny and the painful with a few bursts of violence and the overall warmth of decent people trying to figure out what's best.

Giamatti excels as the weak-kneed Mike, nicely working his gift for inner conflict and outer bumbling. As his wife, Amy Ryan is a ballast of unflinching moral certitude. Playing assistant coaches/sidekicks are the angular Jeffrey Tambor and the antsy Bobby Cannavale, who provides some comic relief — maybe too much — as a ubiquitous third wheel. His sitcom-ready omnipresence and a too-neat-by-half ending are the only false notes in the film.

But the real story is Kyle's, and the real star is Shaffer, a dark-eyed natural whose adenoidal monotone reveals a hard edge of wariness cut with hope. This is a kid, we realize, who's been betrayed by adults, yet he's the one who treats the senile Leo with love and respect: buying him Cocoa Puffs, campaigning to move him back home. He understands the bonds of family best of all.